Book Festival Preview: Gene Wilder contemplates love in his latest work

Love and food. They're probably the only safe topics of conversation at the Thanksgiving dinner table, the themes that never fail to get people talking and laughing together.

So it's appropriate that the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta is ending its 19th annual book festival with a visit Sunday from an author who spends a lot of time considering both. Gene Wilder, the actor-turned-writer, is speaking about his latest book, "What Is This Thing Called Love?" It's a collection of twelve short stories about different types of romantic love -- unrequited love, infatuation, young crushes, cheating, cynical love and desperate longing -- with many scenes that revel in the joys of eating (mostly steak and fine wine).

Reading Wilder's tales, one distinctly gets the sense that he'd tell us to set aside our talking points, stop sharpening our knowledge of logical fallacies and, above all, quit memorizing our all-crucial argument in the Brandy vs. Bristol debate. Instead, Wilder focuses on simple observations about human nature with fiction inspired by his own life, family and friends.

Wilder, who most famously starred in "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" in 1971 and wrote "Young Frankenstein," admitted in an interview with NPR in March that he's a total romantic and spends most of his waking hours thinking about love. At 77, he's got a lot of experience to draw on. As he tells it in his 2005 memoir "Kiss Me Like a Stranger," he first married too young and too quickly and a second time for the wrong reasons. His third marriage, to Saturday Night Live actress Gilda Radner, ended with her untimely death at 42 from ovarian cancer. He's been with his fourth wife, Karen, since 1991.

One of the more interesting characters in "What Is This Thing Called Love?" is Buddy, inspired by Wilder's late cousin Buddy Silberman. The Buddy character, as Wilder paints him, is a the kind of back-slapping guy who calls women "broads" and is forever single, even in late middle age. Over the course of several sake-soaked meals at a sushi restaurant with his friend Sonny, Buddy reveals a crush on the waitress. When the relationship sours, he plays it off as nothing. But Sonny discovers the truth that Buddy won't admit: he was actually in love.

"What Is This Thing Called Love?" is Wilder's third work of fiction since 2007, after his novels "My French Whore" and "The Woman Who Wouldn't." Publisher's Weekly reviewed the book unfavorably, calling the stories "forgettable" and the characters "generic." Yet the review concludes that the collection of stories meets the humble goal Wilder set out for himself in the introduction, to give the reader "a little pleasure and a laugh."

Whatever his limitations in writing, however, Wilder will be drawing on decades of experience as a storyteller and actor in his appearance in Dunwoody on Sunday. Based on recent radio interviews, he hasn't lost any of the engaging but endearing personality that first shined through in characters like the nervous accountant in "The Producers."

Above all, expect him to spark ideas for some good stories to share with the family at Thanksgiving.

Gene Wilder is speaking at 2 p.m. this Sunday, Nov. 21 at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta,  Tickets are $11 for MJCCA members and $16 for non-members, available at atlantajcc.org or by phone at 678-812-4002.